


Secreted

by rageprufrock



Category: Secret Garden kdrama
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's on the fourth day, when Oska has already written five songs and the lyrics for maybe like two (other) songs when his manager and the label guy pass out together on the couch, that Oska sneaks toward the kitchen for escape that he runs right into Tae Ssun — wearing an apron clearly stolen from Ra Im and making kimbap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secreted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hydrangea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrangea/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! Apologies, it was self-betaed, but I hope you enjoy!

Tae Ssun shows up at the house sometime in between two snowstorms.

It actually takes Oska almost a week to notice because his manager and some guy from the record label have been sitting on him like jailers (jailers!), feeding him store-bought kimchi, microwave rice, and dirty water as they squeeze music and lyrics out of him. At one point, he manages to convince his sister-stroke-cousin-in-law to bring over one of her little monsters to terrorize everyone and buy him two minutes of free time, but then Joo Won follows her, collects his spawn, confiscates his wife, and takes away the kimchi as punishment — so Oska is then left with only his abject misery, a certainty he's going to die, the microwave rice, and two even angrier handlers.

It's on the fourth day, when Oska has already written _five songs_ and the lyrics for _maybe like two (other) songs_ when his manager and the label guy pass out together on the couch, that Oska sneaks toward the kitchen for escape that he runs right into Tae Ssun — wearing an apron clearly stolen from Ra Im and making kimbap.

"You!" Oska says.

"Me," Tae Ssun says, and then he points a knife at Oska's million-dollar face. Somewhere out there, 200 ajummas just fainted in horror and they don't even know why, and Oska draws his cardigan around himself for protection. "And you — you better be turning right back around to finish your album."

How could Tae Ssun betray him this way? "How can Tae Ssun betray me this way?" Oska wails — quietly, darting a glance back over his shoulder to his manager (snoring) and the label representative (weeping quietly in his sleep).

"Because I have had a terrible year, and I feel like being mean to someone," Tae Ssun tells him, unrepentant, and before Oska can show this kid the fury of a grown up, Tae Ssun sticks a plate of square kimbap in Oska's hands. "Here. I put in extra ham and cucumber."

Oska is torn. He loves square kimbap. The squareness makes it taste better. But. "I hate ham and cucumber."

Tae Ssun bears the knife again. "I know," he says. " _Go._ "

Oska's already back at his piano, and another two sets of lyrics for songs that he has actually written, even, in before it fully sinks in — crunching cucumber and gnawing on ham bitterly — that Tae Ssun is in his house.

***

Seul is always saying ultra cruel things like, "I don't have time to deal with your adolescent tantrums," and "Grow the hell up and finish your work," and "I'm hanging up now."

When Oska calls her to say that Tae Ssun has broken into his house and is making him square kimbap with extra cucumber and ham and do you think that he's all right? Why would Tae Ssun come back? Seul is quiet for a long time, first, before she murmurs into the phone, "I don't know why he would come back, but you should be kind to him, and careful with him."

Oska can barely wrap his head around that. Being careful is something you do with fragile people, like Joo Won when he's in one of his Moods. Tae Ssun looks like if a mood tried to seize him he'd punch it in the face and then spit at its mother, which is what he's probably about to do if that guy from the record label doesn't stop trying to intervene where Tae Ssun is ferociously marking up Oska's sheet music with a bright green Keropi pen.

"It's Tae Ssun," Oska says, because _it's Tae Ssun_. "I'm not going to lie: I'm pretty scared of him."

Seul laughs, and it's beautiful, gorgeous, makes Oska feel happy to the tips of his toes, to the fizzy places past his hairline, buzzing in the air around his head.

"But that's you, and Tae Ssun is Tae Ssun, and then there's the rest of the world, all right?" she says, and there's one of her dense and very secret smiles in her voice.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Oska tells her honestly.

"Get off the phone and get back in here!" Tae Ssun yells from the other room. "All of these songs are crap!"

Oska makes an pleading face at the phone, even though Seul can't see him.

"I know," Seul says, appeasing. "I know. Just go."

"He's horrible," Oska hisses at her, watching Tae Ssun abandon the piano bench and head toward him, holding the pen like a dagger. "I love you. He's going to kill me."

Seul says, "Tell him I said hello," and Oska is whining, "Seul, you — !" when Tae Ssun is upon him, snatching the phone out of Oska's hand and marching him at pen-point back to the piano.

They manage to hammer out all the wrinkles and imperfections of a song just before midnight, the two of them working together, and by then Oska's loopy with exhaustion, fingers trailing over the keys sloppy and careless, all the notes slurring together while Tae Ssun sings along — his voice a perfect tenor lace to the evening.

***

It starts snowing again not long after Oska and Tae Ssun finish their third song, also known as, after Tae Ssun stops yelling at Oska his third song is terrible, and Oska's manager loses rock-paper-scissors and gets sent out to go buy supplies.

"He's going to come back with a giant crate of soju, porn, and ddukbokki," Tae Ssun says, watching the manager stagger off through the snow drifts, fighting the wind.

Joo Won, because even though _Oska_ is the celebrity, he's not the ridiculous cousin, sends a series of texts like, "Oh, I just paid an unemployed graduate student to go buy us groceries," and "It's kind of hilarious; he's begging for a job! Ha ha ha!" and "No, but seriously. I'm not hiring that kid out of spite. He bought the wrong brand of ssamjang."

"Is your entire family just awful people or you two?" Tae Ssun asks, when Oska shows him the messages.

Oska glowers. "Hey! Joo Won and I have a tenderly heartbreaking personal history you know! He had repressed memories! And trauma! And I, as the older brother, sweetly nursed his fragile spirit."

Tae Ssun makes a series of annoyed ajumma noises, and opts to ignore Oska's emotional confession in favor of writing something probably defamatory on his minihompy. Oska's asked a dozen times but Tae Ssun hasn't coughed up his username yet. There's the nuclear option of turning Oska's online fans on Tae Ssun as internet detectives, but Oska's not going to put it past Tae Ssun to stand over his bed at night with a butcher's knife, either.

"Hey," Oska asks, later that night after the manager comes back — finally — with, as predicted, a giant crate of soju, porn, ddukbokki and half the premade foods from the nearest convenience store, "why are you here, Tae Ssun?"

In the background, manager and the label guy are looking over the songs, humming together and tooling around on the piano, discovering what Oska and Tae Ssun discovered already, traveling across tamed notes. The sky beyond the windows looks boozy and dark like a bruise, ghostly and hovering over the gleaming white snow, banked up two feet high and climbing up in frost along the frames.

Tae Ssun looks strange in this light, the orange from the ludicrously overpriced lamp Joo Won had brought over the other day gilding the lines of his face so that he looks even younger and softer and a touch sadder than Oska likes to see him.

"Why?" Tae Ssun says, instead of answering. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No," Oska says, honest. "I didn't want you to leave the first time, either."

One time, when they were little, when Oska had been Woo Young 100 percent of the time, he and Joo Won had been horsing around and Joo Won had hit his head, hard, against a slab of concrete. Tae Ssun looks like that right now: blank, stunned wordlessness, knowing that it's going to start hurting any minute now.

"I just mean — you seem sad," Oska hurries to say, in case the first things he said were wrong. Usually they are, if Seul is anything to go by. "You seem upset. When you left, you seemed different."

Just like that, the Tae Ssun who threatened to punch Oska to death before breakfast is back in the curl of a lip and the narrowing of his eyes. He looks older than he really is again, aging ten years with all the cynicism, and Oska's stupidly grateful — or he is until Tae Ssun says:

"I met a guy. He was an asshole to me, and then I had nowhere to go. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"No," Oska says. "It wasn't."

He waits until his babysitters black out from drinking the crate of soju, more or less face down in the stack of porn, and then he bullies Tae Ssun into going to bed early — "You could still be growing!" Oska argues. "Boys grow until they're 22!" and Tae Ssun says, "I swear I will go to bed if you stop being a psychopath." — so he can get on his computer and send out an extremely important message.

***

HELLO LOYAL FANS, Oska writes. YOU ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL. I NEED YOUR HELP TODAY! OSKA'S FRIEND HAS BEEN HURT BY A CRUEL MAN. WHAT CAN I DO TO CHEER SOMEONE UP? PLEASE DO NOT INVESTIGATE THIS PERSON AND TERRORIZE THEM ON THE INTERNET. <3 <3 <3

***

Almost everybody's advice is scary ("Set him on fire!" and "Tell his mother!" and "Ruin him in his workplace! Anybody who would hurt a beloved friend of Oska deserves it!") but Ra Im is the only one who's scary enough to stomp through snowstorms while six months pregnant to interrogate Oska in person. At first Oska is going to keep confidences and be quiet as a grave but then Ra Im smiles at him and tucks her hair behind an ear, taps her foot, and all of a sudden he's vomiting out the whole truth about Tae Ssun and how he's gay and likes Oska and how he must be part-magic, because Seul knows and didn't rip his trachea out, which makes Ra Im laugh like a crazy woman.

"Shh shh," Oska begs, glancing down the hall at Tae Ssun's room, the door slivered open. "If Tae Ssun finds out he's going to murder me."

"So the cruel man?" Ra Im asks. "Was it you?"

Oska glares. "I am a man who is _gentle_ with soft hearts and — "

"Are you sure he's not upset because he's still in love with you?" Ra Im asks, ruthless. Spending time with Joo Won has turned her from a very sweet and wonderful woman who is too good for Joo Won into a very sweet and wonderful woman who is occasionally _exactly like Joo Won_.

"It's not me!" Oska snaps. "This is Tae Ssun! He's way too smart for that."

" _Cruel man?_ " Tae Ssun yells, his voice echoing down the hall. " _Investigate this person and terrorize them on the internet?_ "

"Hello, Tae Ssun!" Ra Im yells.

There's the scrambling sound of Tae Ssun hurling himself out of bed, a mad thump of feet, and Tae Ssun yelling, " _I am going to kill you!_ "

"Oh, shit," Oska says, and takes off for the yard, wishing he was wearing about 17 more layers of clothes and that he had some sort of defensive weapon as he hears Tae Ssun coming after him, and because Oska has been lucky in life and lucky in love he hopes he's lucky in this, too, and calls over his shoulder, "But you're still reading my minihompy! That means you care! You would be sad if I died!"

Later, after Ra Im has convinced Tae Ssun to stop feeding Oska dirty snow, and Tae Ssun has forced Oska to issue a retraction (I LIED I DO NOT HAVE A FRIEND WHO HAS BEEN HURT BY A CRUEL MAN AND WHO WOULD DO SOMETHING HORRIBLE LIKE FEEDING ME SNOW THAT DEER HAVE PROBABLY _PEED IN_ BUT I DO STILL LOVE YOU ALL AND THINK YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.  <3 <3 <3), in the intimate dark of the house, Tae Ssun says, out of nowhere:

"I just needed to come hide here. Just for a little while." He's quiet for a while, and sneaks a look at Oska. "Is that okay?"

Oska hits him with a sheaf of paper. "Your key still works. Don't insult me."

"Just for that, I'm making you _round_ kimbap with extra, extra cucumber and ham," Tae Ssun threatens, but he's grinning when he says it, so Oska thinks maybe he won't yell that much when he realizes that what Oska did with the refrain for song three.

***

Seul, older, is a different, deeper taste of her. When they'd been together the first time, all the pieces were there but in a wash of watercolors. Years later all the colors and shapes have darkened: pencil into ink. It's wonderful, so wonderful, to think that the the girl Oska loved before turned into a woman even _more_ the person he loved, with softer edges, what seems like a larger heart.

Oska writes three songs for her, and one for Ra Im ("Do you want to die?" Joo Won asks) and then he's left staring at where Tae Ssun is staring out into the blinding white snow, sun streaming into the garden, motionless in his brooding.

Okay, Oska thinks. Maybe if I don't _say_ that it's for him.

Seul knows anyway, instantly.

"But how?" Oska asks, horrified both by the the way the Skype video pixelates his skin and Seul's sorcery.

She rolls her eyes at him, and behind her, Oska can just see the edge of a curtain flapping in the summer's evening breeze. She's in Bali doing a drama and four days ago her stress finally defeated her terrifyingly expensive skincare products, and Seul's face is a ruin of acne, framed off by giant plastic lenses and an imminensely attractive and near-constant twitch in her eye. Oska has never loved her more. He can't wait to watch the drama. Apparently it involves forest witches, which is just stupid enough to make sense in the context of Joo Won's stupid life.

"I know because normally you'd ask Tae Ssun if the lyrics are good, and now you are hiding in your bathroom, sitting in your bathtub, asking me on Skype," Seul says reasonably.

"Or it's magic," Oska proposes.

"Or it's magic," Seul allows, and mulls over the e-mail he'd sent her. "I think it's good."

"Do you think Tae Ssun would like it?" he asks, and Seul's face softens, a touch of warm light pearling over her features like sunshine through the windows of Vermeer's house.

"No, I don't," Seul tells him honestly. "But that doesn't mean it's not good — or that it's not true."

Oska accepts this, reminds Seul to eat well, not to exchange hatred for sleeping, and reminds her that he loves her, more than anybody has ever loved anyone else in the entire history of the universe, and makes a series of kissy faces into the computer until she hangs up on him to yell at their screenwriter.

He looks at his lyrics again. He thinks that he can't be any more honest about it. He'd tried to say it all: that Tae Ssun is too talented to waste himself on unhappiness, that Oska is genuinely sorry about everything, all of it, for not seeing Tae Ssun as the kind of person he can love — and here, Oska starts singing to himself, just under his breath — _please keep making that music that I can._

***

Oska is one song short of an album, and most of the snow has melted when he wakes up on a Tuesday morning and he finds Tae Ssun's room neatly cleaned up, everything set away, a letter on the counter.

"Oska — thanks again for letting me stay," Tae Ssun had written. "Take this as rent."

Underneath, he's written six bars and a bridge: sultry, jazzy, too smokey to be treacly. Like Tae Ssun's unexpected softness, it comes with an unexpected bite.

"Like I can sing this," Oska complains, but his heart feels overfull, spilling, aching sweetly in his chest, which lasts until his manager wakes up to realize they're all free, finally free! and then Oska's getting dragged into Gangnam, into the recording studio that's been booked and waiting for, quote, "forever."

He save's Tae Ssun's song, feeling a little shy. When Seul comes back from filming, he plays it for her, and listens to her hum out the lyrics, picking at them in her little sparrow voice, his piano notes tripping ahead of her, the music slipping away from them, smoke curling away.

When that's done, he plays her Tae Ssun's song, the other one — the one that's all Oska, melodrama and evocative strings — and Seul listens with one of those witch smiles on her face.

"Well?" Oska asks. "Do you like the music? With the lyrics?"

"Tae Ssun is going to be furious when he realizes you've written a soppy love song about him," Seul says reasonably.

Oska shrugs. "He didn't prosecute when I was stalking him all over Korea, so I'm not that worried," he says, and Seul's smile melts into a laugh, one that she shares with him, dragging him down onto the sofa, pressing kisses all over his face.

***

A few months later, after Oska's album drops, he writes on his minihompy:

HELLO BEAUTIFUL FANS!! MY NEW ALBUM ~~~AMAZING YOU~~~ IS OUT!!! IT INCLUDES SONGS I WROTE FOR MY WONDROUS BEST BELOVED, FOR MY VERY IMPORTANT FAMILY, AND FOR MY SPECIAL FRIEND. ENJOY!!

It takes less than an hour for Tae Ssun to figure it out and send a stream of absolutely horrific profanity at Oska's mobile phone, which would be funny if one of Joo Won's mercenary little brats hadn't gotten a hold of it and started to blackmail his precious uncle to keep it a secret, with extra charges for not teaching his siblings any new or interesting vocabulary.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Tae Ssun yells, later, calling from wherever he's calling. Oska never knows what the little monster goes, only that Tae Ssun always has Oska's number. "I nearly had a heart attack on the subway when I heard that song."

"Hah, only fair for standing over my bed with a knife," Oska retorts.

There's a short silence. "Even aside from the fact that you're confusing your horrible fantasy life with reality again," Tae Ssun sighs, "you're _nuts_."

Oska grins into the phone, and hopes that Tae Ssun can hear it, can see it, through the lines.

"When are you coming back?" he asks. "When are you recording your song for me? I can't sing it, you know. It's all wrong for me. You'll have to be on my next album."

And then Oska leans back and lets Tae Ssun's complaints roll over him — the sound of a city who knows where — because underneath it, living beneath the words, is Tae Ssun's smile, too, small and always just a touch sad, but there, and growing wider.


End file.
